Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Technical books that influenced my career

Here's a list of 25 technical books that had a strong influence on my career, presented in a somewhat chronological order of my encounters with them:

  1. "The Art of Computer Programming", esp. vol. 3 "Sorting and Searching" - Donald Knuth
  2. "Operating Systems" - William Stallings
  3. "Introduction to Algorithms" - Thomas Cormen et al.
  4. "The C Programming Language" - Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie
  5. "Programming Windows" - Charles Petzold
  6. "Writing Solid Code" - Steve Maguire
  7. "The Practice of Programming" - Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike
  8. "Computer Networks - a Systems Approach" - Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie
  9. "TCP/IP Illustrated" - W. Richard Stevens
  10. "Distributed Systems - Concepts And Design" - George Coulouris et al.
  11. "DNS and BIND" - Cricket Liu and Paul Albitz
  12. "UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook" - Evi Nemeth et al.
  13. "The Mythical Man-Month" - Fred Brooks
  14. "Programming Perl" - Larry Wall et al.
  15. "Counter Hack Reloaded: a Step-by-Step Guide to Computer Attacks and Effective Defenses" - Edward Skoudis and Tom Liston
  16. "Programming Python" - Mark Lutz
  17. "Lessons Learned in Software Testing" - Cem Kaner, James Bach, Bret Pettichord
  18. "Refactoring - Improving the Design of Existing Code" - Martin Fowler
  19. "The Pragmatic Programmer" - Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
  20. "Becoming a Technical Leader" - Gerald Weinberg
  21. "Extreme Programming Explained" - Kent Beck
  22. "Programming Amazon Web Services" - James Murty
  23. "Building Scalable Web Sites" - Cal Henderson
  24. "RESTful Web Services" - Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby
  25. "The Art of Capacity Planning" - John Allspaw
What is your list?

4 comments:

Kees Dijk said...

Nice List ! Recognizing most and looking to put some on my wish-list.

Two notes :
The link to "The mythical man month" is broken (typo in the url)

You link a lot to Amazon which is fine for the reviews and the global reach. But for people who want to save a few bucks http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ is also very nice with world wide free delivery. ( I am not affiliated with them, just like their prices :) )

Grig Gheorghiu said...

Kees -- thanks, I fixed the link.

Anonymous said...

Fantastic list! Good to see some Kaner and Weinberg on the list; a lot of colleagues I talk to only know the Beck and Fowler books.

Werby said...

I would love to get a copy of Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas Cormen. Is this book easy to read? I wouldn't want one that's full of academic stuff. Although I have solid programming experience, I am not adept at algorithms. I got interested in algorithms because I once went to an interview for a job that was all about it. I tried learning on my own but found it requires too much time and focus - things I don't have at the moment. I need something like an idiot's guide to algorithms, if that's at all possible.

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